Early the next morning she received a barrage of alerts on her phone. “It said ‘This stock sold. This stock sold. This stock sold,’” recalled Laino, 29. “It’s like if you wake up at 4 a.m. and your house is on fire.”
Unable to find a phone number, Laino said she emailed customer support but received no response. Then she checked her email’s trash bin and discovered someone had accessed it, setting it up to intercept messages from Robinhood. Laino said she got a call from customer support on Sept. 25. That’s when she learned someone had created fake identification and submitted it to Robinhood to reactivate trading. The forgery had her information, a photo of a different person and a font that doesn’t match Arizona’s official state IDs.
Laino said Robinhood restored her account and stock holdings, but she still plans to eventually leave the firm.
“I don’t want to sell right now,” she said. “But I’m not going to put any more money into it. I don’t really trust them.”
Robert Riachi, 23, is still in limbo.
He said his email was compromised more than a week ago and that thousands of dollars went missing from his Robinhood account. Its customer support team asked him to provide ID, but Riachi said that since submitting it he hasn’t received updates. Each time he asked for one, he got a new case number and now has about 10 of them, he said, noting three are active.
Riachi, a software engineer in Montreal, said he had four years of savings in his account and doesn’t know whether they’re gone because he’s locked out. If he gets the money back, he plans to move his account to Charles Schwab Corp.
“I feel like my money could be put somewhere else, somewhere that has a human person that I can talk to,” Riachi said. “It’s kind of ridiculous that an investment app that’s handling people’s livelihoods, people’s money, has the audacity to make people wait several weeks to hear back anything.”
--With assistance from Annie Massa.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.